I don’t think that’s a fair interpretation, I think Microsoft absolutely intended what they said here, that Windows 10 was the last version of Windows. Hence the shift in development strategy. Annual breaking updates rather than new full releases, the new month-year versioning cycle, free for anyone with a valid Windows 7, 8 or 8.1 license.

I think the goal was to eventually drop the “10” and for it to just be Windows as a service, where major versions don’t really matter and the UX slowly evolves over time rather than in one big change.

Then, something happened. Obviously this is purely speculative, but I suspect either the executive championing this strategy left, or they saw it cutting into their profits more than they anticipated, or enterprises complained about frequent breaking updates, who knows. Then Windows 11 appeared out of nowhere. The signalling from MS for enterprise was clear. Stop monolithic imaging and site-wide rollouts, instead test applications with a pilot group and then push the annual releases wide if no issues are found.

I definitely think something changed. While you’re right that this is the only quote supporting it directly, when asked in follow-ups Microsoft went out of its way to NOT deny the statement or confirm it. If the plan was the status quo, they would have just said “we have not changed our release model at this time” but they didn’t. They knew full well that based on how widely reported that quote was, people would infer that it was the strategy. If they felt so strongly that it was just a simple misspeaking, they would have said so.